EFFECTS OF DISCOURSE STRUCTURE AWARENESS INSTRUCTION INTEGRATED WITH GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS ON ENGLISH READING COMPREHENSION AMONG THAI EFL UNDERGRADUATES
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Abstract
This study aimed to compare students’ English reading comprehension before and after instruction integrating discourse structure awareness with graphic organizers, evaluate the efficiency of the instructional approach based on the 80/80 (E1/E2) criterion, and examine changes in EFL learners’ graphic organizer performance across the instructional units. A one-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was employed. The participants were 50 second-year Chinese-major undergraduates from two intact classes, selected through purposive sampling. The research instruments consisted of five instructional units, a 30-item reading comprehension pretest and posttest with a maximum score of 30 points, formative assessments, and a rubric-based assessment of graphic organizers. The researchers implemented the instruction over five weeks, totaling 30 hours. During the instruction, students learned to identify discourse structures and signal words, analyze relationships among ideas, and represent these relationships through graphic organizers. Data were analyzed using means, standard deviations, percentages, E1/E2 efficiency indices, and a paired-samples t-test. The results showed that the mean posttest reading comprehension score ( = 24.24, S.D. = 3.49) was significantly higher than the pretest score (
= 20.64, S.D. = 5.36), t(49) = 6.55, p < .001. The instructional efficiency was 80.62/80.80, meeting the established 80/80 criterion. Formative assessment scores showed an increasing trend from 76.27% in Unit 1 to 84.91% in Unit 5. Similarly, graphic organizer scores showed an increasing trend from a moderate level (
= 6.50, 65.00%) to a good level (
= 7.72, 77.20%). Overall, following the instruction, students achieved higher reading comprehension scores, while their formative assessment and graphic organizer scores showed increasing trends across the instructional units.
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